U.S. President Barack Obama promised on Thursday to end the perpetual war on terror that began on Sept. 11, 2001.

To achieve that will require luck, great statesmanship, a soft touch that has not been a U.S. strength lately and a rejigging of the budget to put more money and effort into diplomacy, foreign aid and the training of foreign armies and less into the combat wings of the military and the CIA.

To end any war also requires peace partners. None are yet evident.

The president pledged in the same speech to greatly scale back the use of unmanned aircraft to eliminate enemies in the Middle East and South Asia and to provide more checks and balances before such attacks were authorized.

Obama made these commitments at an awkward time. The U.S. is actually ramping up Predator and Reaper operations in Africa. Israel and Britain continue to use UAVs, as the military prefers to call them, in the Middle East and Afghanistan, respectively. Canada, Germany, Italy and other western nations are intent on adding armed drones to their arsenals. Never to be outdone, Russia and China are moving rapidly to join the same gun club.

In other words, as a result of U.S. actions over the past six or seven years, the drone genie is well and truly out of the bottle – with all the attendant moral and ethical questions about targetted killings and collateral damage (a euphemism for dead and maimed civilians) still unresolved.

During the Cold War lists were repeatedly updated with what were best guesses as to the extent to which the Warsaw Pact nations were under Moscow’s thumb and how much or how little room for independent manoeuvre affiliated satellites such as Romania and Yugoslavia had at any moment.

Similar lists regarding the state of the war on terror would be a lot longer, much more nuanced and probably based on far less hard information. It has never been established, for example, what al-Qaida is, who are its members, where it has been extinguished and where it now operates or what its connections are to dozens of other extremist groups.

Washington’s war in Afghanistan is winding down, the war in Iraq is over. So Obama is keeping promises about ending the two big wars that have drained the U.S. of blood, money and international goodwill. Nevertheless, as regards Afghanistan, in particular, the president has given no idea of how he intends to fill the security vacuum as these chapters of the war on terror end with terrorists still on the battlefield.

An example of a possible way forward has been the Pentagon’s beefing up of Africa Command to advise friendly nations there on how to fight Islamic radicals while another batch of military advisers has been training Philippine forces to fight Muslim extremists in the south of that archipelago.

The possibility of U.S. military action to prevent Islamists in Syria from seizing power remains a long shot. But if the civil war, there takes an even grimmer turn, with al-Qaida proxies consolidating their footprint, something may have to be done. And what will the U.S. air force, navy and special forces do about its perpetual war of words with Iran if the Islamist government there gets a nuclear weapon?

Questions also remain about how to stop terrorists from gathering in Yemen, where U.S. drones have been operating with impunity for some time and in Pakistan, which is as volatile, unpredictable and xenophobic a cocktail as ever.

Parts of the government in Islamabad want U.S. drones to continue to assassinate Islamic hardliners in tribal districts bordering Afghanistan. Yet, ironically, it has been bitter opposition to the drone attacks in Pakistan that has at least partially driven Obama’s desire to curb the use of attack drones.

Obama spoke, as Americans often do, as if the U.S. has been in this perpetual war by itself. But Canada has had troops in Afghanistan for 11 years now and has spent billions of dollars there. So has Britain. Other allies such as France, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic and Romania have been there nearly as long. All those countries will applaud the end of Washington’s perpetual war on terror because it will mean the end of their own, smaller perpetual wars on terror.

Alas, Obama’s speech offered little about what is to come if the war on terror becomes a much smaller, less lethal operation.

The recent lethal terrorist attacks in Boston and London and the discovery in Canada and the U.S. of an alleged plot to blow up a train, underline how difficult it will be for Obama to square his new quest for diplomatic outreach and gentler military solutions with the fact that the enemy has clearly not surrendered and does not seek peace.

Postmedia's international affairs columnist is Canada's longest serving foreign correspondent. He has lived abroad for 30 years in Europe, the Middle East, Far East and, most recently, Afghanistan. His... read more work has taken him to 155 countries, all U.S. states, Canadian provinces and territories and the Magnetic North Pole. Professional interests include international relations, security issues, conflict zones and the Arctic. Personal enthusiasms include military histories, historical novels, hockey, baseball, fishing for pickerel and travel by train or ship to anywhere.View author's profile